Wang & Meade (2026-02, Molecular Biology and Evolution) (open access) Molecular Clock Dating Using Complex Mixture Models: Applied to Ancient Symbionts doi.org/10.1093/molb...

Spang & Pisani (2026-02, Molecular Biology and Evolution)（オープンアクセス open access） 「ゲノム情報に基づく生命の樹の理解に向けて」 Towards a genomic understanding of the tree of life doi.org/10.1093/molb...

New paper from my team detailing a greatly expanded genomic database of Asgard archaea revealing of high energy metabolism those related to eukaryotes! Led by @katyappler.bsky.social lots of help from @jameslingford.bsky.social @valdeanda.bsky.social @kassipan.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s415...

MENI is back! Join us in Dublin this August 2026 for our 3rd Meeting for Microbial Evolution in Ireland. We are delighted to have @rachelmwheatley.bsky.social @drrebeccajhall.bsky.social @jpjhall.bsky.social and @tweethinking.bsky.social join us as keynote speakers this year. miniurl.com/MENI

14 more days left to apply for these two postdoc positions in my team. Please share with your network!

Asgard on the move ! Watch our videos! Biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.30.690169v1

Our latest preprint: Together with the team of Jan Löwe, @danieltamarit.bsky.social and many others we discovered and characterized several Asgard tubulin genes and propose that microtubule architecture and dynamics evolved in Asgard archaea prior to eukaryogenesis www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Today we published a Correction on our 2023 @nature.com paper reporting the heimdallarchaeial ancestry of eukaryotes: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Corrected paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Importantly, the re-analyses of the corrected dataset are consistent with the original findings.

I invite you to check our paper entitled “Rebuilding Ukraine’s capacity for fundamental research in evolutionary biology” doi.org/10.1038/s415... in @natecoevo.nature.com about the Ukrainian School in Evolutionary Biology #USEB we organized in 2025. #biology #evolution #school #science #Ukraine

Phylogenetic Accuracy Under Non-Stationary and Non-Homogeneous Conditions: A Simulation Study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41642270/

meetings.embo.org/event/26-mic... Announcing the 2026 EMBO course in Computational and Experimental Microbiomics, to be held at Bath. The course brings together experiments and bioinformatics to study host-microbe interactions and co-evolution. Register now, or at least by 11 May, if interested :)

Join us for interesting discussions at the Computational Approaches to Early Evolution workshop next year in April at OIST in Onna, Okinawa! 🦠💻🧬 Registrations open until January 2nd '26, do not miss it! More info & registration details in the link below! 🔽 www.oist.jp/conference/c...

A newly discovered archaeal cell has a tiny genome and can’t metabolize biomolecules. It’s upending biologists’ definition of a living thing. “These types of organisms have been found before, but not as extreme as this,” said microbiologist Thijs Ettema.

#Archaea, #DPANN, #phylogenetic_reconciliation New preprint online! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Very happy to share our recent work @cultivarium.bsky.social on genetic tools for Ideonella sakaiensis, a (Betaproteo-)bacterium that degrades PET plastic. We identified a plasmid vector for the strain and generated a large RB-TnSeq library, screening for genes impacting plastic degradation.

Functional genomics in a microbe that degrades and metabolizes PET plastic https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.11.687616v1

🧙‍♀️ Something is brewing in the WitChi cauldron… After some excellent peer review feedback, a new update of WitChi is taking shape, refining how we detect and prune compositional bias in phylogenomic alignments. Stay tuned for the next release! 🧙‍♀️ Can’t model it? Prune it! github.com/stephkoest/w...

Come join the Workshop on Phylogenomics in Cesky Krumlov, Czechia, from January 25 through February 7, 2026! Applications close November 15! #phylogenetics #evolution #genomics #ai evomics.org/apply-worksh...

Exultant to have been awarded a Vidi grant by the Dutch Research Council (NWO)! Can't wait to get started! Stay tuned for two upcoming (PhD student & postdoc) positions to study archaeal genome evolution. Also huge congrats to my colleague @dorotakawa.bsky.social! www.uu.nl/en/news/21-v...

Live cell imaging of Ca. Nha. antarcticus and Hrr. lacusprofundi using agarose pads. Protocol now live! www.archaea.bio/protocols/li...

There's a PhD position now available with me in Bath, on the evolution of symbiosis. www.findaphd.com/phds/project.... The supervisory team also includes @anja1.bsky.social @phil-donoghue.bsky.social and others. NB, this is open both to UK-based students *and* to international students :)

Great new trait of #Methanoperedens archaea: Carbon monoxide metabolism in freshwater anaerobic #methanotrophic archaea #aom #anme Egas @cuwelte.bsky.social et al #microbiology @ribesresearch.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Huang, @tweethinking.bsky.social, Sepang et al. use phylogenetic analyses to reveal that the Njordarchaeales and Panguiarchaeales constitute the new class Njordarchaeia within Asgard archaea. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf201 #evobio #molbio #archaea

New preprint up now! Interested in the evolution of halophily within DPANN archaea we decided to investigate the sister phylum to the Nanohaloarchaeota, GTDB phylum EX4484-52, for which we propose the name Caliditerrarchaeota www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-... Happy to share this one. We investigated the #phylogenetic placement and #genome_evolution of Pangui/Njordarchaea-unique #Asgardarchaea that might have undergone genome reduction...

Out in @natbiotech.nature.com: Metagenome taxonomy profilers usually ignore unknown species. SingleM is an accurate profiler which doesn't, even detecting phyla with no MAGs. Profiles of 700,000 metagenomes at sandpiper.qut.edu.au. A 🧵

#Asgard,#phylogeny 1/ 🧵 Does MAGs contamination affect the placement of Njord as suggested by Zhang et al, 2025? www.nature.com/articles/s41... Our updated analysis suggests instead... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

GTDB Release 10-RS226 (16th April 2025) has been published gtdb.ecogenomic.org

Dating Bacteria is hard due to the lack of maxima. Assuming aerobes likely postdated the GOE gave us better resolved ages, but also surprised us, but not Dr Dayhoff, showing O2 use predated its atmospheric rise by 900 Mys and helped oxygenic photosynthesis to evolve. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Job announcement: a four-year postdoc position in phylogenomics at the Milner Centre for Evolution, Bath, with James Clark and me (I'm moving to Bath later in the year...). www.bath.ac.uk/jobs/Vacancy...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A new collaborative paper with Anja Spang, Wen-Cong Huang, @chrisrinke.bsky.social @ettema.bsky.social @ssolo.bsky.social Zheng-Shuang Hua Maraike Probst and Lenard Szantho. We investigated the phylogenetic position and metabolic evolution of Panguiarchaeum.